git-from-the-bottom-up VS git-appraise

Here's a great walk through for how Git works from the bottom up: https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/

It's short, easy to understand and you'll understand HEAD.

Very tangential:

Gerrit also stores some of its configs in a git repo. I was setting up a new instance, but couldn't get Admin permissions because the way my auth front-end didn't play well with the docker image's assumptions.

Gerrit already does a lot of its work via non-standard references. For example, you don't push to a branch, `refs/branches/foo`, you push to a separate `refs/for/foo` namespace that creates the review.

Similarly, Group config is stored in the All-Users git repo [1], but in references created after a UUID, in `refs/groups/UU/UUID`.

I ended up having a to exercise the plumbiest of plumbing commands [2] to create a new commit from scratch (from a tree, from the index, from blobs), to update the group ref to add myself to the Administrators group (this, of course, requires a local shell and permissions on the Gerrit host). It was a great way to exercise what I had learned in Git from the Bottom Up [3]

[1] https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/config-...

[2] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects

[3] https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/

I found Git from the Bottom Up helpful. It is very short as well. Then refer to the official book when you want more detail.

I recently came across "Git from the Bottom Up by John Wiegley" (thanks to Coding Blocks podcast), he has a chapter about rebasing: https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/1-Repository/7-branching-and-the-power-of-rebase.html

You won't have to put your entire life on break in order to understand the fundamentals of git and why it works the way it works. Going through https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/ and really understanding the material will take you a couple of hours at max, but will save you a lot of time in the future.

Wanting to understand things before using them is hardly elitism, not sure why you would think that.

Just like you probably don't want to fix bugs without understand the cause, it's hard to use a tool correctly unless you know how the tool works.

git-appraise[1] implements that concept. From Google, no less.

I've never used it, or seen it used in the wild, but it always seemed intriguing, and like the obvious approach. The web UI traction is far greater for this to have any serious usage, but I wonder if Git had that ability from the start, if the web UI concept would've taken off as it did.

[1]: https://github.com/google/git-appraise

I believe their docs cover the scenario of reviewing someone's code by pushing your review to the git repo, and others can use `git appraise list` to see open pull requests.

https://github.com/google/git-appraise/blob/master/docs/tuto...

A trivial git-hook could be setup for automating email notifications.

I know about Google’s gerrit. I now found https://github.com/google/git-appraise, there seems to be a plethora on the issue and pr tracking side.

Then the other day there was a generic/abstraction layer to write CI that abstracte over gitlab, circle ci, and GitHub actions (maybe more). I suppose all that’s left is to get some api tokens somewhere and go?

Experimenting with distributed issue trackers in git was popular in the early 2010s, there were a whole bunch of different implementations people came up with for git. Most of them died out though, there were typically a few problems - this is what I remember offhand from experimenting with a whole bunch of them:

* Some of them make a mess of some part of git; one of them put its info in separate git branches to ensure changes were always pushed/pulled even without a special push/pull command for the issue tracker.

* At least one of them kept their info in the repo in a dot-prefixed directory and auto added/committed the file as changes were made; this meant a single issue could be in different statuses depending on which branch you were on and there was no overarching view.

* The rest effectively ran in parallel to the git repo, pushing and pulling their data within it but requiring their own commands to do so, so it was totally possible to clone the repo and not get the issues.

* Most of them didn't have a non-repo way to track issues, for project managers and such. One did have a webview that ran from a repo, but it was up to you to figure out how to keep it in sync with the comments/etc devs were putting in their copies of the issue tracker.

Sibling mentions git-bug, a few others:

https://github.com/aaiyer/bugseverywhere (I think this is one of the original ones)

https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue

https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit

https://github.com/google/git-appraise (I think this one is newest and I probably never tried it)